Walter Savage Landor Quotes - Page 5

An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it you are unhappy, if you accept it you are undone.

Fame, they tell you, is air; but without air there is no life for any; without fame there is none for the best.

Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

It is delightful to kiss the eyelashes of the beloved--is it not? But never so delightful as when fresh tears are on them.

Consciousness of error is, to a certain extent, a consciousness of understanding; and correction of error is the plainest proof of energy and mastery.

There is a vast deal of vital air in loving words.

Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.

Wisdom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing them thoroughly; but in choosing and in following what conduces the most certainly to our lasting happiness and true glory.

Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all; if we consider it as a madness, we are equally justifiable in applying to it the readiest and the surest means of oppression.

We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.

Many love music but for music's sake, Many because her touches can awake Thoughts that repose within the breast half-dead, And rise to follow where she loves to lead. What various feelings come from days gone by! What tears from far-off sources dim the eye! Few, when light fingers with sweet voices play, And melodies swell, pause, and melt away, Mind how at every touch, at every tone, A spark of life hath glistened and hath gone.

Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.

When a cat flatters ... he is not insincere: you may safely take it for real kindness.

No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.

Ambition does not see the earth she treads on: The rock and the herbage are of one substance to her.

Immoderate power, like other intemperance, leaves the progeny weaker and weaker, until nature as in compassion covers it with her mantle and it is seen no more.

Something of the severe hath always been appertaining to order and to grace; and the beauty that is not too liberal is sought the most ardently, and loved the longest.

Not dancing well, I never danced at all--and how grievously has my heart ached when others where in the full enjoyment of that conversation which I had no right even to partake.

Life and death appear more certainly ours than whatsoever else; and yet hardly can that be called ours, which comes without our knowledge, and goes without it.

I delight in the diffusion of learning; yet, I must confess it, I am most gratified and transported at finding a large quantity of it in one place; just as I would rather have a solid pat of butter at breakfast, than a splash of grease upon the table-cloth that covers half of it.

In the morn of life we are alert, we are heated in its noon, and only in its decline do we repose.

Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition; never to be listened to, and to be listened to always.

Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty.